Re: [GNUnet-developers] Re: amortizable hashcash paper

[Julia Wolf]

On Fri, 9 May 2003, Tom Barnes-Lawrence wrote:

> On Thu, May 08, 2003 at 04:29:56PM +0300, Igor Wronsky wrote:
> > Perhaps I'm missing something, but the whole discussion below
> > reminds me of giving in to the tyranny of democracy, i.e.
[...]
> -Next: counting the votes of those people who have done _similar_
> searches. How exactly do we define similarity? If we're talking
> about similar == exactly_the_same_really  then I'd think that'd
> be easy enough, but would it be useful? I can imagine a mechanism
> for determining whether 2 searches are similar, but requiring
> reams of statistics for _all_ searches that have been performed
> and who did them. I feel that would be quite accurate but painful.
>
> -Finally: The proposal emphasises that the votes be used to *sort* the
> search results. On the one hand, this is quite a good thing that it's
> not talking about censorship as such, *but* think about it: Everybody
> searches for foo. First person checks the first 10 results, finds them
> OK, and votes for them. Next person is more likely to get those
> results sooner, and vote for them. And the next person. The voting
> system could quite easily polarise the popularity of search results
> such that certain results would usually only appear nearer the far
> end of the lists and stay there.
>
>  Even if someone had the patience to check the whole of a list
> with hundreds of results, their vote would be pretty insignificant
> next to the people who didn't. And of course, if few people even
> get to see a certain search response, it wouldn't be too surprising
> if it never got downloaded, and was discarded from the network,
> never to be seen again.

  You sound like you're describing a power law curve.
  You need to read this:
http://www.shirky.com/writings/powerlaw_weblog.html

  To summerize: The top two people/files/thingies will be several times
larger (in arbitrary counting units) than the vast majority of everything
else. And These structures will naturally arrise from the proccess you
just described above.